The future of the remaining plots of undeveloped land in TriBeCa are becoming clear, even as the horizon above them will be occluded. Curbed notes that the Daily News gives a roundup
on the status of Lots 5B and C (just south and west of P.S. 234 at the corner of Greenwich and Chambers Streets — follow the link, it has a useful map), as well as, what is it? Lot 25D or whatever, across the street in Battery Park City.
I knew this place would be cool someday — we’re getting a Whole Foods!
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Boy, if we had PR flacks like this…
This is a playing fast and loose with the definition of “Above 59th Street” (and sure to infuriate at least one Upper West Sider who will cry out “But we have a Barneys Co-op now!”) — to say nothing of our stated editorial mission — but it’s all the same to me: four deaths in Ulster County (that’s an area of upstate New York somewhere north of Siberia and south of Montreal) have been attibuted to a ‘rare brain disease’ which is how large news organizations describe an illness that might be termed otherwise if they weren’t going to be called very quickly by the very well paid lawyers of the American Beef Council (more properly the Cattlemen’s Beef Board) to explain very precisely is not ‘Mad Cow Disease’ (in fact, they even have a whole web site about it). There still is no information whether or not this is the ‘sporadic’ type — which is not causally connection to beef consumption — or the ‘variant’ type, which is. The beauty of it is that even it is the time to shit your pants and start worrying about such a cluster, there’s nothing you can do since the incubation period can be years (meaning, we may have all ingested the tainted ingredients back in the Go-Go 90’s). This is not a site that doesn’t appreciate a good burger (it is, in fact, one that can engage you in a lengthy conversation that will drain all the fun out of a good burger hunt, so it will stop at saying Big Nick’s is hard to beat, Corner Bistro be damned), but, you know, I like to be really clear each time I open my mouth and insert something (other than my foot) that will mostly certainly hasten my shuffling off this mortal coil. If it’s time add beef to the list, so be it. I just wish we didn’t have to muddle through the dissimulations of the various machinations of beef boosters and be done with it. Test all the meat, or assume it’s coming (and thus, spinning the thin thread of topical relevance, aside from our late evening pissed at the Bosox and taking it out on the namby pamby Times inebriation, this site will not be providing the results of its three year quest for the Best Burger Experience in Manhattan, which wasn’t so much a structured essay as a concept held out as an ideal in other nights of inebriation that didn’t involve the failure of out-of-town professional sports teams or a consideration of the irony of our siding with the outlanders, again, given the stated editorial, etc.). In the meantime, I’ll be over here eating hummus and cultivating my liver disease.
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Don’t ask us to handicap the Sox series.
But you might get a little ‘told you so’: the LMDC announced the award of commissions for the two ‘cultural’ sites at the WTC today, tapping the pervasive bombast of Frank Gehry for the Performing Arts building, of whom nothing was predicted (I opted for Vinoly as an exercise in damage control over the continuing sore loser card he has been playing), and the relative unknowns of Snøhetta, picked here as the likely sacrifical lamb for the Museum facility. I have nothing to add about either: for the latter, well, I plead ignorance, even as their site has some nice projects, and for Gehry, Bilboa can offset only so many abominations of formal subjectivity. Look for the use of ‘soaring’ and ‘expressive’ ad nauseum over the next few days.
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Seeking proper usage advice on “shorties” joke.
The LMDC has announced the short lists for the two most important comissions in New York currently unawarded. Too bad this information isn’t anywhere on their site. The Architect’s Newspaper brings us the details because Kevin Rampe is probably busy getting tips from Dick Cheney on how to dodge asbestos liability.
It’s a good list, not a great list, which is about what could be expected. There are some interesting surprises, and some obvious nods. OMA is interesting, since Rem was all talking big about what waste of time the WTC site was before all his USA commissions went the way of Richard Grasso. Two firms made both lists: Polshek and Moshe Safdie, but ArchPaper doesn’t provide info (if it is obtainable) on how many teams pursued both projects (which required seperate RFP’s). FOR THE MUSEUM building (International Freedom Center and Drawing Center), the short list is:Pei Cobb Fried
Robbrecht en Daem (with Pasanella + Klein Stolzman + Berg)
Shigeru Ban + Frei Otto with Dean Maltz
Snøhetta FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS building (Joyce Dance Center and Signature Theater), the short list is:
Bing Thom with Meyer/Gifford/Jones
Gehry Partners (no site)
OMA (with LMN)
Rafael Vinoly
Studio Libeskind
Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen with Adamson Associates
TEN
H3 Hardy Collaboration
Tod Williams & Billie Tsien Smart money is on Vinoly for the latter. His deep pockets — for an archtiect — and simmering anger at being passed over makes this an easy way to distract him and create some more of that wonderful collaborative spirit we saw after Childs & Libeskind had their shotgun wedding. For the former, Polshek would seem to be the leader, but given he’s wrapping up the Clinton Library, the selection is before the election, we have a Republican Mayor and Governor, and the Chair of the Freedom Center is a big Bush backer, that pretty much scotches his run. Pei Cobb Fried are doing the Goldman Sachs tower across the street (they are going to actually use this one, they swear), so that dampens their chances. I’ll take the dark horse, Snohetta, since the Freedom Center will be such a fiasco of progamming, they’ll need a convenient sacrificial lamb — all the better if they speak broken English when you blame them.
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There are times when people are condemned to playact.
This is a quote from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that has always stuck with me, even as the specific context of his point wilted in memory. One reason the quote stuck is I wore it on a tee shirt for a couple years back in college. The shirt was made for a bicycle race that used to be held each year at my hippie liberal arts college during the Indy 500. It was the alternative transportation antidote to car races, five hundred impossibly small laps in front of a disused dorm building. Being a hippie liberal arts school didn’t necessarily mean it was all peace and love: the corners (it wasn’t even an oval) were sprayed with Teflon, and people retrieved compost and dung from the campus pet that quarter, a pig, which they proceeded to dump on you (the only rule of the race was “If you throw tomatoes, they can’t be in a can”). It was rumored one year people sought a passing circus for elephant dung.
So our team shirt bore the Kundera quote on the back (and, to give you an idea how just how smarmy a student I was, there was a Baudrillard quote on the front), and, later that summer, while interning here, I was waiting to go to a show at CBGB’s (the friends of friends duty, but I incidentally witnessed the subsequent Suckdog/Costes show, one of those things the seeming decline of makes your middle-aged laments of “New York has changed for the worse” seem defensible instead of trite), and thumbing through magazines at St. Mark’s Books (still on St. Mark’s), only to be interrupted by a strident feminist, who proceeded lecture me on the shortcomings of Kundera’s characterization of women in his novels. I didn’t necessarily disagree and was even perversely pleased that someone would interrupt a stranger to engage in a fairly sophisticated bit of literary criticism, which was terminated when I replied laconically that “I made this shirt for a race where people dumped pig shit on me.” Again, where has that town gone?
This quote popped up when I came across the Freedom of Expression National Monument in Foley Square a few weeks back. Partially it was the obvious symbolism: the instillation is a shockingly red megaphone attached to a platform reached by a short ramp. There is little doubt the intent of the piece, though for the doubters, there is a plaque helpfully affixed to the base of the ramp: “You are cordially invited to step up and speak up”. The megaphone is pointed at the Manhattan County Civil Supreme Court (best known recently as the site of the Martha Stewart trial), though it could have been rotated is most any direction and been effective. Created by architect Laurie Hawkinson, performer John Malpede, and visual artist Erika Rothenberg, and sponsored by a Creative Time, it is a reprisal of its original presentation in 1984 for Art on the Beach (1978-1985), when it was sited on a beach located in Battery Park City.
My first thought seeing it across the Square was fleetingly that was this was a piece of work by John Hejduk that I did not know. Perhaps only for formal reasons, it called to mind the House of the Suicide, one of his ‘masques’ that was constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology during roughly the same period. The similarities are not, strictly speaking, derivative, but appropriately respectful of an idea: a rigorous geometry of structure that is not inherently the most rational (as a matter of engineering precision) solution, executed in mostly rough framing, which imparts an obsessive though not explicable logic, and an overall form that is both familiar and unsettling. It bespeaks of the strongest qualities of Hejduk’s work, and a perusal of Hawkinson’s CV indicates she received her BArch at Cooper Union the year before the Freedom of Expression National Monument was first mounted.
Even as the form is a deft execution of a process that I can find little fault, the overtly social commentary would seem to be a clear departure from the spirit of Hedjuk’s work, which is frequently appended with a number of obliquely positive adjectives personal, poetic and the like, mostly meaning strange to many a viewer. Except Hedjuk was not apolitical. The House of the Suicide was inspired by a poem about Jan Palach, a Czech student who found the condemnation of playacting to be a sentence he could not bear, and he immolated himself in 1969, as the Soviets were crushing the Prague Spring. It was his ability to imbue form with meaning that was not hopelessly subjective or grandly didactic that he clearly imparted on Hawinkson (and was shared by her collaborators).
And so we have an example of what the intervention of ‘art’ can be at its most effective: forms that are striking of their own accord, and still beguiling enough to seek to unearth what informed their creation. Of course, a big megaphone doesn’t require much excavation. But it does strike a nice balance between the whimsy necessary to draw people while still echoing some of the strident symbolism of social protest art, much of which can be attributed to the relentlessness of the red paint.
Where it is disappoints as social action is the ineffectiveness of the tool: yelling does not make you heard. Speaking up is not rewarded with the visceral effect of an echo reverberating off the walls of unyielding institution, but instead leaks tepidly out, resulting in an exercise Kundera would understand. The symbolism of this runs counter to the vibrant spirit of the artists’ statement, and so I conclude that the disjunction is a result of the vicissitudes of making public art.
Visiting over several weekends produced little in the way of incidents of speaking out. Given the light foot traffic of Foley Square off-hours, visitors, if any, were lost or particularly thorough tourists. It looks lonely most of the time, like a toy wanting to be played with. But such trifling terms should not be taken as an attitude of diminution; it is not a piece devoid of understanding the tenuous grip of democracy, and as much as it works to be engaging, its stoic presence when no one approaches is a compelling antidote to the weighty if overcooked symbols of ‘justice’ (or not — the INS is right there as well) that surround it. It’s a shame it was not closer to 100 Center Street during the convention, where the certain febrile emanations from those camped out to support detainees would have been the most poignant realization of Kundera’s comment.
That it feels both contemporary and emblematic of a very particular prior period makes the experience more acute. Being too young to know it first hand, but knowing enough of the genesis of the imagery, given the relative permanence of most of the buildings in the area, you can squint and imagine it is 1984 again, and the distance from the era of Reagan, the palpable anger at his willful silence regarding AIDS, and contemporaeneous development of the template for unfettered accumulation and consumption we are still in the thrall of, seems like nothing at all, carefully tracked by our big, red contrivance forcing us to recall Uncle Karl’s wisdom.
So what’s it like? Well, to that end, I must report cowardice, or worse, got the best of me. Not knowing for certain to what extent my words would or would not carpet Foley Square provided sufficient trepidation. But more damning, I could find nothing I wished to say. You, and I, have a chance to prove otherwise until November 13.
Click here to view photos of the installation.
(note: link is off site — photos presented via the excellent folks at flickr)
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The devolution of the hero.
David Dunlap provides the details (to perhaps even an unnecesary degree: thermoplastic grout? Yeah, I was wondering about that) of the completion of a project I have been following, quite literally, the progress of over the summer. Jogging up lower Broadway is part of one of my regular routes, and I noticed one evening the presence of slices of what looked to be brass (turns out to be granite with inset stainless — affixed by the aforementioned thermoplastic grout) stripes that cross the sidewalk as you move north from Bowling Green. They each had a terse description of an event that, after passing a handful, I presumed to be the occassions for ticker tape parades. I was planning to mention this earlier, but progress seemed to be stalled around 1950. What struck me was the frequency in the early part of the century, and a focus that seemed to be disporportionately political figures (which struck me as odd, given how anonymously a world leader can be in the city now) and war-hero related (which was entirely understandable). Given my lived experience of them as a series of drunk New Jersey-ites feting the Yankees (can you tell I’m a lifelong Red Sox fan? Though given what I saw of Yankee fans, I would be even less inclined to attend a Bosox parade, hexed impossibility notwithstanding), I was looking forward to the sixities and beyond, where I could trace the general degredation of civic celebration from the standard of those who saved countries and ruled them to pajama-clad pretty boys and louts who hit a fast moving ball with a stick. But I’ve passed on that route lately, and thus missed out on the progress. Dunlap doesn’t provide enough specifics to bear me out, and the evenings are now dark early enough to prevent a review. I doubt I will be disappointed when I give it a shot some weekend. But the city is betting big on Yankee domination for decades to come: some 33 spots are held empty for expansion. The way the Bombers are pitching these days, they should last well into the next century.
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Size Matters.
I try to consciously limit observations of those that could be nominally termed public (which means they are reasonably accessible, and require no fee for entry), but occasionally there is an odd confluence that seems worth sharing. I recall a conversation I had about the role of proportion in design with a former professor, then employer, and now friend (which is a great progression for being able to challenge your elders) who wasn’t the source of, but enabled the focus of my intellectual discontent (which of course meant the attendant intellectual laziness justified by half-baked critiques) as it ranged through the ravages of lit-crit solipsism enabled by an academically suspect institution, while skipping over more ‘traditional’ methods and standards.
He managed a more thorough progression using the reverse track, so when it came time to test a design thesis, or apply some order, he was very quick with most of the traditional methods, and adept. I was surly (mostly out of jealousy), but had what I thought was a salient point: the rigors of harmonic proportion, based in math and music, were necessarily hard to test in the lived experience. If a room some 70 feet to a side (or better yet, a freestanding structure) was not quite a golden section, off by six inches, say, how many people could discern the error? Anyone who has fought with actual building design (real walls, real budgets, etc.), knows the complexity that can mount trying to instill this level of order. It was a convenient way to be a little lazy (as I said) when resolving dimensional issues, and, were it to be assailed, there was the handy intellectual progression from harmony into dissonance and, say, Glenn Branca (who my boss was fond of as much as he was Kurt Weill). But my own personal journey from Dave Brubeck to Albert Ayler wasn’t simply an excuse for not knowing the golden ratio off the top of my head, and but was as much a journey of understanding and discernment (and its own sort of snobbery, sure) as it would be to study Pythagoras. And I tend to be fussy about alignments and precision, so it was partially being a smart ass, and partially a true question about perception and absurdity. I also tend to be fairly skilled at estimations of measure: passage of time, distances, and the like. Knowing construction standards over time certainly helps, but I always struggle with defining the experiential concept of space as it extends beyond requirements to comfortable to grand, to overwhelming. It is a crucial consideration in design: When you draw a room that is twenty feet to a side, it is grand? Sure, it depends on the furnishing (and the prior experience of the inhabitants), but the space itself will impart an impression, informed by finish, light, and, yes, Dan, ratios (it must be equally pleasing for the mentor to watch the juvenile petulance give way to a nuanced search for the ideal). And I can never quite reconcile the gap between a generalized concept and the actual. But I got a very good schooling on what big can feel like last evening, having attended the New York Theater Workshop’s ‘revival’ of Hedda Gabler. I know little enough about Ibsen to comment on the particulars of the production in the context of his body of work (and its traditional staging), or really even enough of theater in New York generally, to say much beyond I found it very compelling. Of course, having been educated by friend on the value of it, I tell everyone I can that seeing theater in New York is precious opportunity that fortunately shows no signs of abeyance, at least in my relatively short experience. I’ve been a regular attendee at the NYTW over the past few seasons, and their work is uneven, in my estimation (with the complex qualification that ‘average’ theater in New York most might still find exceptional, and the first performance I attended there was Caryn Churchill’s Far Away, which ranks as one of the most visually stunning — to say nothing of the terrifyingly brilliant script — events of my life, and a high water mark to subsequently crest). Their staging, however, always impresses me, with a wide range of approaches, and in what is a good, but not ideal, theater space. A testimony to their effectiveness is that I have never been able discern exactly how large the space is. Thanks to this performance, I can report that theater proper is around 2800 square feet, easily calculated by the stark sheets of drywall that cover the auditorium, neatly stacked in five columns across the stage and seven deep to the rear wall. It is a commanding effect, not quite construction rough (the drywall tape is rather fussily applied in neat lines), but it is certainly raw. The stage is kept spartan for most of the performance, and then it is downright stark. With about ten minutes before curtain, I found myself relating all sorts of measures to this corner or that: my current apartment would fit there, would be this wide. My first bedroom (eight feet by seven) in NY would be there. And, obviously, a open living space forty feet wide and some thirty deep would be a very pleasant way to utilize a mere 1200 square feet (less than half the size of the average home constructed today). At least to a New Yorker. That I would spend those minutes in such a way attests to the particulars of my mania, but one that I am sure would find great sympathy with most who have sought living space on this island. That I did not know anything about the play before walking in made the experience all the more the perverse. If you aren’t familiar with the play, I’ll not go into detail (if you are as much a cultural philistine as I, see this link for a more detailed synopsis and review), but I can say generally that a key plot point is the acquisition of a large house had somewhat dearly, which, rendered abstractly as a commanding singular space by the staging, must resonate quite acutely with the lusting hordes of loft-seeking Manhattanities. Given our conditioning in the current market, it reads as expensive in a way that no amount of cluttered granduer of a more text specific staging could. And, no doubt, it’s a nice room. A lovely room. Again, a particular mindset must be had to find unfinished drywall, albeit rigorously applied, viscerally appealing, but good light and room to walk (and run) illustrates just how little may be needed to live a robust life. Worth seeing, because this innocent vista will no doubt crumble (how much Chekov do you need? there are two guns on the wall), and in a way that should expose just how bankrupt our pursuit of the real estate mirage truly can be.Posted in Uncategorized Comments closed
Exactly how dim is the NYPD? Well, apparently they never heard of this Internet thing.
Continuing their inexplicable logic that riding a bicycle on the streets of Manhattan is somehow qualitatively more criminal than driving a car, or, really, just testifying to some feelings of sexual inadequacy (though you have to be careful with lines like these: a friend, stopped by an officer — in, granted, a small Southern city — late in the night after he decided to collect a number of traffic cones he found attractive in his inebriated state, said in reponse to the officer’s request to replace the cones, or be written up: “Ah, now, I know you can’t be a cop, because you can read and write”. This of course resulted in a trip to the drunk tank and his first experience with the best drunk descriptor ever “toe up from the floe up” [written phonetically]) through silly displays of authority, the NYPD turned up at the Critical Mass ride Friday with their pissy little flyers about not riding three abreast, etc. and, stymied by the clever actions of some, who, fearing a seizure like last month, simply dismounted, locked up their bikes and walked off, proceeded to steal legally locked bicycles. And here’s the kicker: they sawed the locks. This, after everyone in the world watched the demonstration last week on how to open a Kryptonite lock with pen. Mabye it’s true that real cops can’t write, and thus were without the proper implements for stealing a bike in this city.
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Fireman Ed loves it, so it must be okay.
The Times reports that said Fireman is a well-known fella who is pimping for the Jets regarding the stadium, and since I don’t read the tabloid sports regularly, I have to take it on faith they aren’t being sarcastic or ironic.
BY THE TIME you read this, it’s probably too late. But don’t worry, the Dolans and the Johnsons called all their friends, and it was surely a packed and spirited debate (though perhaps lacking the quaintness of grandmas in IKEA shirts) at the ULURP hearing on the Hudson Yards proposal today at the Taft Auditorium at FIT. It’s a sad day when I have to depend on the Dolans to carry the banner, but they have strong financial motivation, and since there is to date no evidence that strong, reasoned debate will not stop this fiasco, we may as well see how the old school way of insiderism and influence peddling goes. LATER ON, you can trek downtown and see Kevin Rampe or one of his minions pay lip service to public safety. Though you can hardly tell from the LMDC site, there is a public meeting on the deconstruction plan for 130 Liberty Street. Details as follows:6:00 pm – 9:00 pm (with a meet and greet beginning at 5:00 pm)
Location: TRIBECA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
At the Borough Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street, Theatre One
Entrance: between Greenwich & West Side Highway, enter school, pass campus safety at main entrance and bear right.
If you can’t make this one, the LMDC does provide for public comments via the website.
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There’s only trouble and desire.
Many people in New York seem to hail from the Midwest. A disconcerting quantity are from Ohio, as am I. I’m often curious to discover what draws them here. The answers are often inarticulate, which is perhaps unfair since it’s hard to put a clear sense of purpose on a time of transition. Or, after a spell, we craft a nugget of clever concision that likely better represents our aspirations rather than the actual facts.
That representation is often a shaping of the ideal we concocted for our existence and this city, or, better our existence in this city, one that is inevitably latent, an agglomeration of narratives we learn through films, novels, perhaps if we are diligent, the consumption of periodicals and media from a distance, in the belief that it will allow us to become more authentically a New Yorker more quickly (and without, say, actually having to become Norman Mailer or Fran Lebowitz).
Because moving here, unless you are wealthy, is really fucking hard. And staying here is often worse. Whether that story was fully formed on arrival, or sanded and polished over time, hardening into a amulet we take out in the depths of drunken night and measure our lives, which have become adorned with better clothes, good food, the occasional foray into some cultural consumption that is absolutely superior whatever it was we knew back in Dayton or Lexington or St. Louis, the company of people mostly less interesting than we hoped, and the intractable sense of superiority of having pulled it off, against this ugly little ornament that is still far more arresting than anything we live from day to day. Maybe it’s wrapped in a Voice article from a generation ago when someone said the exact same thing.
It’s terrifying to come across something so incisive that is seems to have be wrenched from your consciousness, or worse, after having known it from years, you find yourself unable to separate your knowledge of the thing from itself, and your subsequent thinking. Maybe none of it is yours, simply a neurotic deja vu repressed to protect your thinning ego.
The first time I saw Simple Men was the day after my most melodramatic college breakup. My last quarter, fumbling for an adult future, fears for my able to trudge through the end of a thesis, nothing exceptional in any way now, but the seeming end of the world back then, punctuated by a film that seemed so fitted for that moment that I would have had to make it were it not there (not say that I could, but still). I hate quoting films, but the lines “Tomorrow. The first good looking woman I see… I’�m not gonna fall in love with her. That’ll show her!” would pretty much sum up the lives of most every male friend I’ve had for the past fifteen years.
And so if Hal Hartley didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him. But because he does, there are times where the scrabbling desire to be relevant to an uninterested universe seems redundant, since time will unveil another hidden nugget that reminds you that anything original you may have thought was rendered better, and earlier.
Moving here just as third wave of Williamsburg settlement was occurring, college graduates from Brown and RISD stumbling upon Metropolitan Avenue as if they were Columbus establishing a beachhead in the Bahamas, I watched witlessly as they brayed about how ‘over’ Manhattan was. A recent import myself, from a place that absolutely qualified as the hinterlands, but even I managed enough knowledge to point to Hartley’s incomparable Theory of Achievement a sketch that predated us by a half decade, and one that dutifully archived the inevitable reality Williamsburg had become (even as those ‘pioneers’ tear at their hair about its demise now) before most of these kids heard of Neil Postman. And I want to ask them: have you seen this? Really. No, really, because if you had, perhaps a wee bit more humilty would be in order.
And today, today I saw the latest sketch from Hartley with more wit and insight than I manage over dozens and hundreds of words. His new production company, Possible Films, just released a collection of mostly hard to get short works from the past decade. One, The Sisters of Mercy, is unreleased. A remix of a video shot for the Red Hot Organization, Iris, Hartley is disarmingly blunt about what impels a filmmaker at times, noting:
This is evident in the resulting video, a series of stunning close ups of two stunning women, one who has evolved into one of those avatars of downtown life that we imagine ourselves living, or meeting, Parker Posey.
The content of the re-cut video is enough to give an idea of what the original was like (“Two young women playing out roles associated with the purchasing of real estate. Questions regarding the worries of ownership versus the worries of being un-invested. Intimations of a life filled with effort and debt.”). Made ten years ago, it looks like it was shot last week. And a few minutes of outtakes of his trademark redundant, deadpan cadences while the camera lovingly ogles Posey and Sabrina Lloyd overlays the signature line from an even earlier paean to Manhattan living, Ambition, where the protagonist, after preaching of litany of qualities of world capitals and their appeal (language, culture, love of music, etc.), blurts out “I love New York because the most beautiful women in the world live here.”
Is that all? Beautiful unattainable women parading the streets below the lavish, unattainable real estate? That can’t be it. Hartley himself reflects on what it is like for those of us who has accomplished what it is his protagonist in Ambition wants most: “I want the image I have of myself and myself to become one”:
And so the image of Hartley films haunt and gird me as I walk over the same streets, a series of tired aphorisms in my head: the more things change, best of times, everything is different. As satisfying as it is to see a reflection of who you are (or simply who you want to be), however wry or pointed it may be, is this an adequate substitute? Is it anything other than nonsensical for those outside your narrow slice of experience. As annoying as I find Jon Jost, maybe he is simply the Hal Hartley of the ten years before I got here, perhaps this is simply another one of those tired, obvious cliches that, if I wait long enough, will turn up in a Roz Chast cartoon, the unaccomplished liberal male who fetishes Hartley films as significant, when they are really just an elaborate version of the malformed desires of shy boys who presume that their complex yearning is the same as actually making a fucking film. I’m sure somewhere Hartley has, like, an answering machine message he left that discusses this very point. I”ll just have to wait around for him to release it. In the meantime, go buy the DVD. He’s self-publishing material, and by the look of it, still is working
for distribution on his new features. Let’s try and show that New York doesn’t yet again have to depend upon Europe to support some of its most accomplished artists.